Brother Pinocchio
by Omnicat
Summary: The Black Lion has a very familiar surprise for Shiro. / a post-canon Kuron fix-it AU


**Title:** Brother Pinocchio

 **Author:** Omnicat

 **Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** _Voltron: Legendary Defender_ seasons 1 through 7

 **Warnings:** Canon-typical.

 **Characters & Relationships:** Shiro & Black & Kuron

 **Summary:** The Black Lion has a very familiar surprise for Shiro. / a post-canon Kuron fix-it AU **/ 2181 words**

 **Author's Note:** #JUSTICE FOR KURON :C

 **II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

 **Brother Pinocchio**

"What is that lion doing?"

"Yeah, what's it got in its mouth?"

"Should we call someone?"

"Like who? The police? 'Excuse me, officer, but I think one of those building-sized lion mechs that saved the world just stole a shipping container. Could you please come give it a stern talking-to?'"

"No, its Paladin, duh."

"Shouldn't the Paladin already be _in_ the lion?"

"That's not what I heard. They say these things sometimes just wander off on their own."

"Guys, come on, it's clearly just helping someone out by moving some supplies."

"These are ancient noble alien war machines, dude, they wouldn't lower themselves to the level of a cargo pilot."

"If it's trying to help, someone should probably tell it not to gnaw on the containers and leave a trail of blankets and bed rolls everywhere."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"I'm not telling it that."

"How about we call Commander Shiro so _he_ can handle it."

"Good idea."

 **I-oOo-I**

"Hey, Black old buddy, whatcha doing?" Shiro called out as he crossed the massive, empty spaceship hangar at a light jog. The Black Lion was fussing with something in the corner furthest from any of the ground entrances. She looked up at the sound of his voice and, inexplicably, growled and raised her particle barrier.

Shiro's stride faltered. Then he sped up.

"Black, what's the matter?" he asked, coming to a stop at in front of the barrier. "Is something wrong?"

 _WAIT,_ she impressed on his mind in feelings rather than words, so suddenly and pointedly it made his head spin.

"Wait?" he repeated, clutching his head as he tried to catch a glimpse of anything but Black's wriggling back end. "You mean, for you to finish whatever it is you're doing there?"

 _YES,_ she thought back, pleased and thankfully less overwhelming. _MINE. YOU WAIT._

"Uh. Okay. I'll wait."

Shiro lowered himself to the ground and settled in to wait. Off to the side, he could see the shipping container the cadets had told him about, torn open and spilling vacuum-sealed bedding everywhere. Every so often, the Black Lion would swipe up a pawful of pillows and blankets and thin mattresses. The sounds of tearing plastic would follow, and the occasional rip of fabric. From the way Black raised her paw in the air and started irritably shaking it until a mauled blanket detached from her claw and fluttered away, Shiro assumed the latter was not intentional.

Eventually, Black sat up, her head almost brushing the top of the barrier. She inspected her handiwork and, purring for all she was worth, curled up around it. Then and only then did she lower the particle barrier.

 _COME SEE. COME GREET,_ she urged. And, with immense pride and affection: _SHIRO. MINE._

His first, absurd thought was that Black had had kittens.

His second, once he'd successfully navigated to the top of the pile of slippery plastic packaging and barely better bed linens and caught sight of what she was so happy about, was a very long, very not-proud and not-affectionate scream. For a moment his brain refused to process what he was seeing. But then he was filled with the horrible, and horribly familiar, phantom sensation of his mind coming unstuck from his body.

"What. Is _that?_ " he forced out.

 _SHIRO._

"Yes, I can see it's me!" he burst out. "Where did you _get_ it? Where the hell did it come from?!"

Black's head had only the one point of articulation of her jaws, but between the ominous growl that was starting to build and the way her eyes lit up, Shiro got the distinct impression of a pissed-off glare.

 _HE,_ she thought at him, creating words in his mind more clearly than he could remember her ever doing before. _NOT IT. NOT THING. PERSON._

Black clearly had half a mind to swat him away from her prize and lock him out of her particle barrier again if this was going to be his attitude. That, more than anything, brought him back to himself.

In front of him, packed snugly (almost suffocatingly) in the nest Black had built for it, lay his own, original body. It seemed to be deep asleep, and the faintest hint of a blue glow surrounded it. Shiro knew instinctively that it was his. It had his hair, his Paladin suit, and his prosthetic arm from the day he'd died. But it was more than that. There was a connection, a familiarity, an acceptance of its features somewhere deep inside that he'd never quite managed to reach when seeing his own face on camera. He _knew_ , somehow, that this was not him anymore, but that nonetheless he'd known this thing – this _man_ – all his life.

But if the body wasn't _for_ Shiro, and the Black Lion was so delighted with and fond of it, and wanted him to call it a 'he', who _was_ it?

"Who is he?" Shiro whispered.

Black nudged an image into his head of his own face, smiling valiantly through the strain of fear and confusion and exhaustion, his bangs just a smidgen too short and his undercut gone.

"The clone," Shiro realized, chest constricting. The creature who took his place and nearly killed his team. "But –"

 _SHHH,_ Black thought, with the feeling of a nudge of a furred nose against his cheek. _MINE. SAFE. FREE. GOOD. LIKE_ YOU.

She showed him her perspective on the memories he had inherited from the clone's time posing as him when he took over its body. How the clone's heart had called out to her and the others in its time of need, as clear and true as Shiro's own; how the clone had done all the right things and felt all the right feelings; but how something the clone couldn't explain had always niggled at the back of his mind, some subtle wrongness in the world or his body or perhaps in just his mind, and he'd increasingly started to wonder if this was combat stress taking its toll or something else; how he had tried so hard to be the right person, to be a _Paladin_.

She showed Shiro the hollowness at the heart of the poor, ignorant fool. No soul, somehow. Deliberately isolated from the cosmic tapestry by Haggar's malevolence. Where his own connection to life and the world and the quintessence of the universe should have been, had sat a gaping hole, empty despite all his desperate efforts to be a real boy. Empty – until Haggar reached into that mockery of the core of him and filled the void with her will instead, overriding everything that had so tenuously made him _him_.

All along, that emptiness had been the keyhole Haggar built in to grant herself access and unlock her purpose for him. His body and mind, his very existence, had been nothing but an animated glove waiting for her to slip her commands into.

"Stop," Shiro gasped. "I don't want this. Stop, please."

He – they – didn't remember it this way. For all the agony of the transition from mostly-Shiro to the witch's puppet, Haggar's sick, twisted corruption flooding his being hadn't felt like such a bone-deep violation from where they'd sat. It had felt natural. Almost like a relief, in the end. An end to the everlasting, futile struggle of being Shiro, to the instinctive but incomprehensible search for that indefinable thing they were missing.

But he realized now that Haggar hadn't been what they'd been missing. Haggar had only made it so there was no them left to miss anything.

Everything Shiro had thought he'd known about the clone was suddenly turned on its head.

It wasn't his enemy. It had never been his enemy. The clone was just as much a victim of Haggar's perversion as Shiro himself had been. Haggar had given him life, but in the process stolen everything that should have _meant_ from him.

Purring soothingly, Black pressed her safe, grounding presence into Shiro's mind until his breathing slowed and he found his strength and his calm again.

 _LIKE YOU,_ she repeated. _MINE. NO LONGER HAGGAR'S. TRULY MINE NOW._

Shiro looked down at his sleeping double and then up at Black in wonder. "What did you do?"

Black and the clone flying together, their minds melding together into a single being. Quantum entangled. One entity existing in two places at once. Two entities simultaneously taking up the same space. The Lion-Paladin bond at its finest, just as Black and Shiro's had been. Throughout everything, she had kept some aspect of both of them safe within herself, and when Haggar had torn the clone apart and away from her, Black had preserved the man he had been however she could.

She had gathered the tattered pieces of his being together inside herself and infused him with her life and her love. Had given him a safe place to heal and rest – and, without Haggar's foul, inhibiting influence, gestate the soul that always should have been his.

"You gave him what he was missing," Shiro realized. "His own place in the universe."

The Black Lion purred again and laid her head on her paws to watch the two of them to her heart's content.

 _Life Giver,_ Shiro thought, looking down at his – at the other Shiro. _She's made you a real boy._

"The body, though. Where'd you get my old body? I thought I died and it... I don't know, disintegrated during the teleportation or something," he said.

Black cocked her head, as if surprised the answer wasn't obvious to him.

Another procession of images, this time in a cartoonish style full of chibis and speech bubbles that made him wonder if the Lions had somehow started watching television or if she'd plucked the concept from his childhood memories:

Shiro versus Zarkon, and Shiro pulling off a magnificent first teleportation only to go up in a puff of smoke. Black catching the floating dust that had once been his body with a bug-catching net and storing it safely in her metaphorical pocket, unsure of how to reverse the consequences of this odd glitch, exactly, but knowing she would need his physical matter to do so. Keith wandering around calling his name. Black meowing and pawing at Keith's jacket to get his attention, only for Keith to put his hands over his ears.

Keith finally ready to bond with Black and listen to what she had to say, only for the other Shiro to pop up out of nowhere. Haggar peeking around a tree with a stethoscope topped by a radar dish. Black looking from incorporeal Shiro on one side of her to clone Shiro on her other side, unsure of what she could do about the situation without alerting Haggar of the first Shiro's continued existence. A bubble depicting her imagined scenario of dangling the first Shiro in front of the team by the scruff of his neck, only for the other Shiro to short-circuit, start glowing purple from every orifice, and attack them all.

Haggar wrapping the other Shiro in puppet strings and making him attack the team anyway. The other Shiro, just as incorporeal as the first Shiro now, but curled up with his arms over his head, all bloody and bruised and banged up, clearly in no shape to rejoin the fight for a while. Allura lowering a fishing rod through an open panel in Black's head, and Black taking in the battered second Shiro while hanging the first Shiro on Allura's hook to be revived. An extra chibified second Shiro swathed in bandages and nursing from Black's nipple like a kitten (an image Shiro _really_ could have done without) while first Shiro and the rest of the team defeated Haggar and eliminated her sinister influence once and for all. Everybody going home to relax. Black basking in the Earth's sun, happily tapping away at a calculator.

And then, finally: Black horking up the new Shiro like a hairball.

Shiro stared. "Please tell me you didn't mean that as literally as you seemed to mean it."

Black radiated innocence.

"Oh, _geeze_."

He felt a little bad about it, but he could only laugh. Laughing about it was better than the alternative.

Trying to put names to the different Shiros in Black's story had made him think of something, though. He was sure the team wouldn't have an issue with the other guy once Shiro explained the reality of the situation, and the Black Lion's involvement, but having two Shiros around would be confusing. And it had only taken coming face to sleeping face with him, and this one conversation with Black, for Shiro to decide he wanted this guy to stick around. It was like finally meeting the stillborn twin brother he'd never gotten to have.

...oh. The twin brother he never got to have, huh?

 _RYOU,_ Black agreed.

"I wonder if he'd like that," he murmured.

Shiro knew _he_ would have liked it, but this guy wasn't him anymore, was he? He was well and truly his own person now.

"Will he wake up soon?"

 _SOON,_ Black confirmed.

Shiro couldn't wait to meet him.


End file.
